The Real (and Virtual) Adventures of Nathan the IT Guy

The soon to be release #1 Backup solution for ESX 3.5 and vSphere is better than ever! Read below for all the new features. If you would like to be notified when Veeam Backup 4 gets released go here.

• Native support for thin-provisioned disks for faster full VM backups and restores, to reduce the amount of storage required to host your production VMs.

• Ability to leverage ESX4 changed block tracking for lightning-fast incremental backup. For instance, if a VM only had 5 percent change since the last backup, the incremental backup time will be 20 times faster.

• Support for the new vStorage API – a VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) replacement. With VCB being discontinued, the vStorage API is the recommended API for VMware vSphere backup going forward. For example, the backup of vSphere

Fault Tolerant VMs will only be possible using the vStorage API. While Veeam is still committed to supporting VCB as long as our customers will require, native support for the vStorage API makes Veeam Backup & Replication the most future-proof solution currently available on the market.

• Support for virtual applications (vApp) for more flexibility with your job setup.

Near-real-time replication at a fraction of the cost In our continuing effort to provide the best VMware replication capabilities on the market, Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 now leverages the new vSphere ESX(i) 4 functionality to provide much faster replication cycles. You can now schedule replication jobs to run as often as every few minutes, allowing you to achieve very low recovery point objectives in case of disaster, thus providing near-CDP (continuous data protection) protection at a fraction of the cost.

Unlike competitive solutions that require replicated VMs to run with open snapshots (which prevent Live Migration and DRS)

Veeam Backup & Replication does not have this requirement and instead uses new vSphere ESX(i) 4 APIs to achieve fast replication cycles. Veeam Backup & Replication also provides the ability to fail over to both current and earlier points in time in case of software corruption – functionality not available from other vendors.

Other Enhancements

Numerous additional enhancements requested by our customers are also included to make Veeam Backup & Replication even easier and more convenient to use:

• Safe snapshot removal. Veeam Backup & Replication now implements a safe snapshot removal technique to prevent production applications from timing out during helper snapshot commit. This makes Veeam Backup & Replication the only truly production-ready application able to perform hot image-level backups and replicas of large VMs with high disk I/O loads without affecting production applications.

• PowerShell access. You can now control all aspects of Veeam Backup & Replication via PowerShell scripts. This allows you to automate all Veeam Backup & Replication activities, such as job creation and control, changing settings and so on.

• Full backup every N cycle. You can now configure jobs to optionally create full backups at defined intervals, instead of performing forever-incremental backup with synthetic building of the full restore file. A full backup can also be initiated manually from the user interface.

Replication

• Replica seeding. You can now optionally perform initial replication over removable storage, instead of having full replication traffic go over WAN.

• Multiple job creation wizard enhancements. Creating jobs is even easier than before with the new ability to search for objects based on a few letters from the name, seeing the size of your selected scope of objects, and the ability to estimate the required disk space for backups given your retention policy.

• Ability to change backup and replica destinations on existing jobs so you can move the destination without requiring a full backup from scratch.

• Ability to disable jobs. You can now temporarily disable a backup from running on schedule with a single click, without having to open job properties or clear the schedule.

• Ability to customize VM attribute used to store backup results (backup date and time, backup console name, and path to the backup file containing the specific VM) upon successful backup.

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About This Blog

Nathan is a Senior Technical Architect and he’ll be blogging about virtualization, portable apps, useful little-known apps and general IT issues and resolutions encountered in his role as an IT consultant. He’ll also be blogging about his certification exam experiences with the MCTS track. Currently he has VCP3,4, 5, VTSP4/5, VMware VDI Accredidation, and MCP Certifications.